Meet Yevhen Sentiabov

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Yevhen Sentiabov. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Yevhen, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

I believe life experiences and challenges directly impact our character and qualities like resilience.
My mother was raising me and my younger brother all by herself. She was working two jobs to provide food and pay the bills. To be able to help her, I found my first summer job at the age of 14th. Since then, I have been working at least partially. While studying at the university I met my future spouse and we stayed in that city building our small family after graduating.

When in 2014, Russia occupied my home – Crimea, I was not able to go there anymore and visit my mom, she had been living under Russian occupation for 4 years. Only in 2018, finally, we were able to bring my mom from the occupied Crimea. Meanwhile, my younger brother was living in the liberated from Russian-supported collaborators Luhansk region.

My childhood and war which started in 2014 contributed to building my character including resilience to stress and challenging life situations.
In 2019, my wife and I moved to the US and opened a new page in our life book with new experiences and challenges.

When in 2022, Russia started a full-scale war against Ukraine, our families were trapped in the war conflict in the middle of Europe. The Russian forces destroyed the city where my brother was living and he, his wife, and 2-year child had to flee it.
Also, my cousin joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and helping him and his unit gives me a lot of strength.

One of the factors that helped to build my resilience is sport. Since being a kid, I have been doing different sports, soccer, muay thai, and kickboxing. Participating in competitions on different levels challenged me not only physically but mentally as well.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I grew up in a small town on the Black Sea coast in Crimea, Ukraine. The city is surrounded by mountains and used to hike there a lot when I was growing up. I think the surrounding mountains and sea developed in me a passion for hiking and adventures. My house was located on the highest hill in the city, every morning in high school I ran 5km and enjoyed the view and fresh sea breeze. My school was located 15 minutes from a beach, and during spring and autumn time we used to go swimming with friends after school. These moments are one of the most precious about my native town.

Since being a kid, I loved computers and spending time with them, though I got my first one only in high school, before that, I was studying their architecture and components only in books. I think, around that time I developed a strong interest in technology and it defined my future career.

First year at my university, I spent nights behind the computer learning programming languages. The university curriculum required prior experience with writing programs which I didn’t have and to be able to keep up with the program I had to put a lot of effort into studying.
In my third year of university, I started working as a WEB developer freelancer, and since then I always try to grow professionally.

During my career, I worked in different international and domestic companies, startups, and big enterprises. I had a great opportunity to present as a speaker at multiple conferences across Europe and publish my work in a couple of magazines.

With my spouse, I traveled across Europe, but I never had intentions to leave Ukraine. But in 2019, I got a relocation offer and my spouse suggested that it would be a great life experience for us, so we moved to Austin, Texas. And she was right. When people ask me, what I like the most about the US? I tell – the people. I had an opportunity to meet very cool people, from different countries, with different backgrounds and experiences.

Now, I work as a software engineer at Adobe company. The product I’m working on is IO Runtime – an Adobe serverless platform, Our platform is globally distributed and works under high load. Such factors create many challenges for engineers like supporting high availability, zero downtime, and constant growth of customer traffic. I like such challenges as they allow growing professionally, learn new technologies, and especially solve complicated issues.
In many cases, customers have unique requirements for their business and implementing appropriate solutions is not trivial work.

Since the beginning of my professional career, I have always looked for challenges and sophisticated work. The most exciting I find in my job is when I can work on highly loaded services where every millisecond matters for customers. Usually, it requires a lot of exploration, brainstorming, and good technical and analytical skills to find the proper solution.
My previous position was as a solution architect, which was mostly related to designing complex systems, and I moved to the current team to work on IO Runtime because of the challenges it provides. In such systems, even a small improvement can provide benefits to the customers.

Besides the work, I found my passion in hobbies. I like spending time outdoors, hiking, and mountain biking. In a couple of years, we visited 17 National parks, some of them multiple times. Trail hiking not only provides a great opportunity to enjoy nature but also builds physical endurance.
But my main hobby is competition shooting such as IDPA (International Defensive Pistol Association) and USPSA (United States Practical Shooting Association). I started competing in this sport a couple of years ago and so far have taken a pedestal on Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas state championships. This is a good sport for building physical skills and performing under pressure.

When Russia started a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I joined as a volunteer founded by the Ukrainians in Austin non-profit organization – Liberty Ukraine Foundation. My primary focus was medical supplies for the military and civilians. Just only in the first months of the full-scale war, with the friends we sent to Ukraine tactical medical supplies for over 30,000$. Now, I try to help as much as I can my cousin and friends who are in the Ukrainian Armed Forces defending freedom.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

1. Fundamental skills. No matter what work or activity you start, the fundamental skills in such area will allow making the right decisions. Fundamental knowledge helps us to build a needed baseline and layer the next skills on top of it.

2. Persistence. A skill to be methodical and consequent in overcoming challenges and obstacles, and achieving the defined goals.

3. Hard-working, I think the previous two skills, like many others, are based on this. Only putting much effort towards a specific goal would allow achieving it. This skill was always the most important in my professional development and sports competition.

As Ben Stoeger, World and US practical shooting multi-champion, says: “Train frequently, train hard, but most importantly – train smart”. In my opinion, this phrase can be applied to almost everything we do.

Alright so to wrap up, who deserves credit for helping you overcome challenges or build some of the essential skills you’ve needed?

I would say it’s my grandfather. He was born just at the beginning of the WW2, he lost his mother during the war. My great-grandfather enlisted in the army in 1941 and returned home only in 1947, despite the war ended in 1945 he spent 2 years in the Czech Republic demining territories. My grandfather was raised by his grandparents. At the age of 12, he started working on the farmland. He was well-educated and worked as a chief engineer. He got his university degree while working full-time and providing for the family.

While growing up, with my younger brother and my cousin, we spent a lot of time working on something with my grandfather in the countryside. He taught us not only how to do things physically, but also how to develop our thinking process, be analytical, and build communication with people. But most importantly, he taught us the importance of knowing our culture, language, traditions and history. His favorite quote belongs to world-famous 19th-century Ukrainian writer Taras Shevchenko: “Learn and read, learn from others, and don’t shun your own”.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ysentiabov/
• Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yevhen-sentiabov-38440758/